Henry: Virtuous Prince. David Starkey

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      All queens, of course, were expected to bear children: that – as many of Henry’s wives would find to their cost – was their job. But in 1486 the pressures on Elizabeth of York had been particularly intense, as André makes clear in his account: ‘Both men and women prayed to Almighty God that the king and queen would be favoured with offspring, and that eventually a child might be conceived and a new prince be born, so that they might heap up further joys upon their present delights.’

      The prayers were answered. And sooner than anybody dared hope. For ‘the fairest queen’ became pregnant almost immediately: non multis post diebus (‘after only a few days’).

      The celebrations for Elizabeth of York’s pregnancy were, André claims, almost greater than those for the wedding itself. Everyone, high and low, in court and country and church and state joined in:

Then a new happiness took over the happiest kingdom, great enjoyment filled the queen, the church experienced perfect joy, while huge excitement gripped the court and an incredible pleasure arose over the whole country.2

      For the queen, no doubt, the joy was mingled with relief. But Henry VII knew nothing of such modest emotions. Instead, his forthcoming fatherhood only opened up new prospects: greater, grander even than anything yet.

The birth of his first child, the king decided, would be no ordinary affair. It would take place at Winchester. And it would invoke the atmosphere of history and romance that hung around the place. For Winchester was believed to be the site of King Arthur’s castle and capital of Camelot. After all, as Caxton had just pointed out in his new edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, published only the month before Bosworth, the Round Table itself was still there to prove it.3

      Then, having been born in Arthur’s capital, the child would be christened Arthur too, and Britain’s golden age would be renewed.

It was a giddy prospect indeed. But it depended on one enormous assumption: that the child the queen was carrying was a son. Presumably the royal doctors and astrologers had declared this to be the case. And the king must have believed them. For if he were not confident that the child could be christened Arthur, what was the point of dragging the court, the heavily pregnant queen, and the whole bulky apparatus of royal ceremonial some sixty-odd miles to Winchester, over roads that had turned into muddy quagmires in the torrential autumn rains?4

      It was a tremendous gamble (imagine the shame and confusion if the child had turned out to be a girl!). Yet the gamble paid off, as Henry VII’s gambles always seemed to.

But only just. The court arrived at Winchester at the beginning of September. Less than three weeks later, Elizabeth of York went into labour and the child was born in the early hours of 20 September 1486, ‘afore one o’clock after midnight’, as Lady Margaret Beaufort noted in her book of hours.5

      The birth was at least a month premature.

      Perhaps the queen had been shaken by the journey, in her gaily decorated but springless carriage or, when the going got really rough, in her litter slung between two horses. Or perhaps it was merely the difficulties of a first pregnancy.

      * * *

But at least the child was healthy, and – above all – it was the promised boy. The Te Deum was sung in the cathedral, bonfires lit in the streets and messengers sent off with the good news to the four corners of the kingdom.6

      It remained only to get the ceremonies of his baptism – dislocated by his premature birth – back on track. The main problem was the whereabouts of the intended godfather, the earl of Oxford. He was still at Lavenham, the immensely rich cloth-making town that was the jewel in the crown of the de Vere family’s principal estates in Suffolk. Lavenham was over a hundred miles from Winchester, and the roads were getting slower by the hour as the rains continued. To give Oxford time to make the journey, the christening was put back to Sunday, 24 September.

      On the day appointed, the other actors assembled: the prince’s procession formed in his mother’s apartments; while the clergy and his godmother, the queen dowager Elizabeth Woodville, who had been restored to the title and lands which had been forfeit under Richard III, prepared to receive the baby in the cathedral. The earl, they were then informed, was ‘within a mile’. It was decided to wait for him.

      They kept on waiting. And waiting.

Finally, after ‘three hours largely and more’, and with still no sight of Oxford, Henry VII intervened. As protocol dictated, СКАЧАТЬ